


AD 2025

by Basingstoke



Series: Waters of Life and Death [13]
Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-09-07
Updated: 2003-09-07
Packaged: 2017-10-03 14:10:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Basingstoke/pseuds/Basingstoke





	AD 2025

His hair was more gray than not, and so was his beard, and tweeds were the wardrobe of the day. Times moved, fashions changed, but there was just something about being a college professor; even the younger professors, the ones with piercing scars on their noses and eyebrows, paired a nice tweed with their black t-shirts and jeans.

And Adam Pierson had been that kind of man, he realized as he tied his shoes. He'd pierced his nose and cheek with safety pins. He'd bleached and dyed his hair every color of the rainbow. And here he was, respectable as a glass of warm milk.

Made you laugh.

He'd brought Adam Pierson out of retirement because he needed the history. Back in the twenties, when everyone was mad from the war and shell-shocked Immortals were scuffling around him like zombies in a horror movie, he'd decided he needed to opt out--to hide. And the best hide, of course, was right under their noses, in the Watchers; but to get into the Watchers, he had to look mortal.

So Adam Pierson had a grandfather, grandmother, mother and father. A clerking job in London and he could insert a real birth certificate for his fake mother; another in Cardiff and Adam Pierson, seven pounds, four ounces, delivered at home by his panicked father, entered officially into the world. Twenty years later he met Don Salzer. One year later he bore a tattoo on his wrist.

No amateur mistakes for *him.* Honestly, he couldn't figure out why so many Immortals had such shoddy paperwork. It's not like they didn't have time to plan--but even MacLeod had been the hidden son of himself, with birth certificate and sundries all burnt in a fire.

Had been, anyway. His current ID had much better documentation, thanks to Methos.

And doubtless the man was thanking him every day, two oceans away--Methos laughed to himself and collected his wallet and keys. He wasn't *about* to get jealous in his old age.

He opened the wallet to the picture of Alexa--happy, standing in the sand in Egypt, wind tugging her hair from the scarf--and kissed it before slipping the wallet into his pocket.

It was Saturday, so he went to visit Joe.

Joe was still a Watcher, but he was doing it all from a comfortable bed these days. His mortality was catching up with him. Fortunately, he had Amy's daughter Beatrice, who was slowly working on a history degree at Harvard and who was happy to take care of her granddad in return for free room and board.

Sweet girl. Knew nothing of the family business. Joe and Amy were feuding over that one; Joe was so far abiding by her demand that Beatrice not know what he did, but ignoring the request to have his Immortal friends stay away. "My mortal friends keep dying," he'd told Methos.

"They do that," was Methos' reply.

Thinking of Alexa.

Methos jogged down the stairs and out the front door, and lucky day, a train was just easing to a stop. He dropped his token in the hopper and took a seat. His field Watcher ran up just in time to catch the same train; Methos caught his eye and smiled. The kid looked down at the floor, face determinedly neutral.

Methos was thinking of Alexa a lot these days. Six months... it wasn't a long time to know someone, but he'd captured her in his memory--her look, her voice, the way she moved, the smell of her hair--and he had a lot of memory to draw on.

The Methuselah stone brushed across his mind, as always, but he put it aside.

At the next stop, someone paused at his seat. "Dr. Pierson?"

Methos looked up. Blue hair, glasses, old-fashioned rubber backpack; Daniel, from his Tuesday Language seminar. "Daniel! Have a seat."

"Thanks--I was actually coming to see what your office hours are. I, um... are you okay?"

Methos blinked. His eyes were stinging--Alexa. He fetched a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it to his eyes. "I'm all right," he said, slipping his wallet from his other pocket. He opened it to Alexa's picture. "My wife, you see. She died... well, before you you were born. So I've quite recovered."

"She's beautiful," Daniel said.

"Oh, yes." He didn't have to look at the picture to know it. "I was thinking how lucky I was to know her at all. We were married for only six months before she died--I'm so lucky to know her for even a day, much less to be able to show her Egypt." Methos closed the wallet and put it away; he blotted the corners of his eyes again and turned to Daniel. "What's was your question?" Methos asked.

"Um." Daniel rubbed the back of his head. "It's kind of trivial."

"Shush. Trivial things are the only ones worth worrying about."

"I can't make the Khoisan click," Daniel said, frustration breaking through his voice.

Methos laughed. "Which one?"

"Any of them!"

"!," Methos said. "The trouble, I think, is that you *can* do it, but in English it sounds accidental and rather rude. You can cluck your tongue, can't you?"

"Sure," Daniel said, and demonstrated.

"Same thing. Just change the position of your tongue." He demonstrated, and Daniel tried to emulate, and the girl in the seat across from them had a silent giggle fit into her sleeve.

Not such a bad way to spend a morning.

Methos glanced up as the Park Street station was announced. "This is my stop," he said.

"Oh--mine too. Thanks, Dr. Pierson." Daniel was focused on his tongue. It gave him a rather odd expression. Methos couldn't help grinning as he stepped off the train and headed to the red line train.

He remembered, as he waited for the second train, his son George, who would be well over a hundred years old now if he had lived past nineteen, and Deborah, his wife, a war widow with an infant who would never know his true father. They had met in a church in London only days after Armistice and married a week later.

Methos was still blind then. His eyes had grown back slowly over the course of their marriage, but he had never been able to tell her. After George was killed, she fell into a despair; she died soon after, of a broken heart and pneumonia, and Methos disappeared, leaving a suicide note behind.

In truth he had thrown himself into the Thames. He swam, drowned and swam again, emerging finally in the Channel, battered, nude and reborn.

Methos caught the red train and headed toward Harvard Square. A man in the seat opposite was reading the New York Times; Methos checked out the headlines casually. Britain was indignant because Iraq was beating its ass in football; migration riots in France; Schwarzenegger still couldn't figure out why he couldn't be President. It didn't look like World War III, and that was all Methos really cared about at this point.

He'd been in America during most of World War II. When Pearl Harbor rolled around and it became clear that there was no place untouched, he'd taken a job as a radar operator where he wasn't fired at even once.

Perhaps that was cowardice. Methos watched the tunnel strobe by the windows and considered the state of his courage. MacLeod might call it cowardice, to let mortals take the bullets for him--but MacLeod didn't fight in the Great War. He drove an ambulance. He thought that had showed him horror, but he was wrong.

Quite wrong.

Methos disembarked at Harvard Square. He tossed a dollar coin to the little punks in the Pit and they whooped and cheered--and wasn't it amazing how some styles never went out of fashion? Mohawks were still the rage after nearly 50 years.

The air was still crisp--it bid fair to be cool all day. He'd have to invite Joe for a stroll. The man hated the wheelchair, but loved spring weather, so perhaps he could be persuaded. Methos wound his way across the square, considering arguments and ignoring the advertisements that lit up under his feet, and caught the 66 bus. His Watcher didn't make the bus. Methos had to laugh.

Joe's house was in Allston. His stop was in front of a Dunkin' Donuts, so Methos dropped in for a coffee and a couple of glazed donuts to sustain him the three blocks to Joe's.

He really loved living in the twenty-first century. The twentieth century was a bit too interesting for him--and so was the nineteenth, for that matter. Once he stopped to think about it, he hadn't been this chill since the French Revolution. Something about all the woodcuts of severed heads...

He licked his fingers as he stepped up on the porch of the little white house. It could use a washing, he noted, and some of the boards of the porch's flat roof were warped from the winter's snow. If MacLeod came to town, they could rebuild it at a proper slant.

Beatrice came to the door as Methos was still examining the woodwork. "Hi!" she called through the screen. "I made muffins! Come have some."

"Good morning, Beatrice," Methos said, and stepped inside. The house smelled like wood chips and lemon. Comfortable. Familiar.

Beatrice lived upstairs, while Joe had converted the large dining room into a bedroom and study. "How's Joe?" Methos asked as he followed Beatrice into the kitchen.

She shrugged, and one of her pet rats--the blue and white one, not the big-eared black one--climbed out of her shirt and into her looped ponytail. "His hands hurt. He's kind of cranky. I think something's going on at work, but he won't say what. I'm getting kind of annoyed at him not telling me anything about work, you know."

"Hm. I'll see what I can do about his hands." Methos petted the rat's tiny head.

"Thanks," she sighed. "I just--God! This week is killing me."

"What's up?"

Beatrice shook her head, but then looked up at Methos. "You've been married, right?"

"Yes... a long time ago."

"How did you know you wanted to get married?"

Methos sipped his coffee slowly and considered the question. "When I looked at her," he said finally, "I couldn't imagine waking up the next day and not seeing her. I just--didn't want to live in that world."

Beatrice had her rat in her hand and was looking like she very much wanted to ask a question. "Yes?" Methos said.

"I thought you were kind of gay," Beatrice said, smiling halfway from embarrassment.

"I am kind of gay. I've been dating a fellow for the past twenty years. But before that, for six beautiful months, I was married to Alexa. And why are you asking this?"

Beatrice held her rat to her cheek and sighed. "Max popped the question."

"Congratulations."

"But I'm *twenty*," she said, "and there's school and Granddad and my whole life, and I don't know what to tell him. I *can* picture my life without him, and I can picture my life *with* him too, and I don't know what to *do*!"

"Have you talked it over with Joe? Or your mother?"

"Neither of them like Max, and they won't say why. That's not really helpful" She rubbed her nose and turned back toward the living room. "If you could tell Joe that I'm not actually five any more, that would be nice," she said before retreating upstairs.

"Thanks, though," she said as she opened the door at the top of the stairs.

Methos raised an eyebrow to himself and took the basket of poppyseed muffins from the kitchen table. He crossed the living room to Joe's room, bit down on the rim of his coffee cup to free up a hand, and knocked. "Come on in," Joe called.

Methos opened the door and set the muffins down on the desk; he took his coffee out of his mouth right before he bit through the rim. "Morning, Joe."

"Funny thing happens when you shout in this house," Joe said, pushing his computer away on its swing arm. "I hear it."

"So why don't you like Max?" Methos closed the door, then brought the muffins and coffee over to the bed.

Joe frowned thunderously. "He's Immortal and he's about 150 years old and I don't like him sniffing around my women."

"Oh, my," Methos said. "Want me to whack him?"

"Don't tempt me," Joe growled. He picked up a muffin--after a try or two; his hands were shaking badly. He was knotting, becoming frail, though his mind was still sharp as a razor.

"Amy's still firm on not telling her? You heard Beatrice; she's not accepting that any more. Frankly, I don't know how long it'll be until she hacks into your computer and finds out for herself. Snooping runs in the family."

Joe's mouth flattened. "She can't hack in. The system's secure."

"No system is secure."

"*This* one is. Remember that punk kid Johnny Roamer?"

"Three hundred year old teenager, yes."

"He found out about us. Tried to hack in. And that's how he makes his living, you know? He's one of the best and he couldn't do it."

"So *that's* why you've been stressed out," Methos said. "Johnny Idiot. I've met him, Joe. In a month or so he'll get bored and leave you alone."

"We'll see." Joe frowned down at his hands. He had the muffin, but his hands were shaking like a leaf in a storm. Methos gently set the muffin back in the basket and picked up the hot salve.

"Hate being old," Joe said. "Don't know why you're joining the crowd."

Methos put all the swordsman's strength of his fingers into rubbing out the knots in Joe's hands. It had to hurt, but Joe didn't cry out. "I just look older. Inside I'm the same as I ever have been," Methos said.

Between the guitar and the cane, Joe's hands had been taking a beating for a long time. Medicine did its best, but people still grew old.

"You're looking down," Joe said.

"I'm not."

"Thinking about Alexa?"

Like a terrier, Methos thought. Joe even looked like one with all that wispy white hair. "Thinking about my son."

"Alexei?"

"George." He hadn't told Joe about George. Joe probably knew something, though, given that George Pierson was, on paper, Adam Pierson's grandfather.

He'd started doctoring the records after World War II. During the 50s, he'd officially come back to England as George Pierson's American son Robert, who later gave life to Adam in his turn. "You know that I was Robert Pierson," Methos said. "You looked into my family tree after finding out I was Immortal."

"Of course. We thought that you just latched onto a real family after the whole confusion of the war--because that history was darned convincing."

Adam's fictional mother was a war orphan, parents unknown. He'd created a birth certificate, average school records, tax records, everything. He himself had been the father--and he had *played* Robert Pierson, in addition to Adam Pierson, until it was time to approach the Watchers. Then he'd given the old man a heart attack and a suitably modest gravestone over the ashes of a few stray dogs.

He'd told Byron once that he didn't want a gravestone. Really, he just didn't want a grave.

"I was Lieutenant Benjamin Pierson," Methos said, and said nothing more.

"And?" Joe prompted.

Methos moved around the bed to reach his other hand and said nothing.

"You're a real pain in the ass," Joe said finally, and reached for his computer. "Voiceprint," he said into the microphone. Once he was logged in, he told it "Name search: Benjamin Pierson."

"Spelling," the computer prompted, and Joe spelled it out.

"Sensitive. Screen mode," the computer said.

"Potential Immortal files," Joe said. "Interesting." He read silently as Methos rubbed out his other hand.

George had always been a fretful child. When he was a baby, Methos had to walk him for long hours down the midnight streets; he would never sleep through the night or even settle enough to let Deborah sleep until he was nearly two.

He'd only encountered another Immortal once on those walks. He'd drawn his sword, sightless sockets bandaged and his child on his shoulder, but the other man had only kissed the baby's cheek and walked on.

"One of our guys saw an Immortal react to you, but then when they looked into your records, they didn't think you possibly could be," Joe said. "And they were shorthanded, so they let it slide."

"Sounds about right." He remembered those years of helplessness--even when his eyes had regenerated, he'd been... shocked. Dazed. It felt like living in a nightmare--one where mortals fought like machines and were mowed down like wheat in a field. He didn't realize that *was* the world until George died.

"They didn't figure you were Immortal because you had a child, and because you were blinded in the war and never healed."

"Obviously I healed. Just not immediately." He still couldn't remember what had happened. A rocket, or a bullet, or someone's thumbs--he didn't know. Didn't matter. "Which Immortal was it that ran into me?"

"It was... Sean Burns. How about that," Joe said.

Methos bent over Joe's hand. "Why didn't he kill me?"

"Because he's Burns! You know how he was."

"Yes, but--" Methos shook his head. "I was traveling, sometime in the tenth century, and I ran into some trouble and froze to death on the side of the road. Burns found me and warmed me by his fire--and I repaid him by trying to kill him with his own sword." He remembered vividly the drip of the snowmelt from his hair, the rough warmth of the blankets on his body, and the feel of the unfamiliar sword in his hand. He knew by heart the look of shock on Burns' kind face--and then the blunt pain that was Burns' wife clubbing him with the firewood.

Burns treated him like a man and Methos turned on him like a dog. Sometimes he forgot how to be human.

"I don't think Burns had it in him to raise a sword in anger," Joe said. "Not against you, not against anybody."

"I forget sometimes that what we are isn't all that we are. That Immortals can have that kind of grace, just as mortals can." Methos let Joe's hand go. His hands still shook, but they had more movement. That was the best he could do.

Joe picked up his muffin and was able to eat it, this time. Methos returned to his original seat and sipped his cooling coffee. "What happened to George?" Joe asked.

Methos closed his eyes. "He was always a fretful child." As an infant, he cried until Methos' nerves stood on end; as a child, he was low-spirited and nervous, prone to nightmares. Methos couldn't work--he collected a meager soldier's pension, and Deborah worked as a nurse to make the frayed ends meet--so it was he who sat with the boy night after night, trying to soothe his troubled spirit. "I taught him to play chess to learn patience, or to--calm down a little. It didn't work, but he was pretty good at chess."

He remembered the boy's small voice calling out his moves on the chessboard. He was always considerate of his blind father. Methos remembered George hovering in the kitchen doorway as Methos shaved at the sink. The boy was always quiet as a mouse, but his breath quickened as Methos brought the old straight razor to his throat. "He learned piano from a neighbor," Methos said, remembering the anise and lavender smell of old Miss Macilreagh, "and when he was a teenager he started playing jazz."

George told him about the clubs. He told Methos everything, and his mother nothing. Deborah hated this, hated how alien her own child was to her, but she mostly vented it onto Methos. He remembered sitting in black silence as she stormed around him--not throwing anything, not damaging what they had, not shouting at her child, but furious in her grief. And it *was* grief; she still loved her first husband with a blushing passion left untarnished by mundane life together. There had been only a week between their marriage and his journey to the front. Methos, thin and silent and wounded, was nothing like her husband. George, fey and skittish and fixated on his music, was nothing like his father.

"George was really good," Methos said. Once he'd gone to the club with George. The boy rested his hand on Methos' shoulder and Methos realized, with a start, that he was as tall as Methos now. A grown man. He'd joined George at the piano as he practiced; while he couldn't see the look on his face, he could feel the boy glowing.

"Tortured artist?" Joe asked.

"Self-torment, maybe. He knew I loved him. I think he knew his mother loved him, even if she couldn't always show it. But I saw the songs he wrote after he died--he had demons inside him. Maybe from the war, I don't know. Maybe he felt the pain and the fear in his mother's womb, and it scrambled his brain." Methos shook his head. "Eadig turned out so well. And Linhart, he was a physician, like me--though I suppose I can't take the credit since he was nearly grown when I married his mother."

He'd always known the boy was gay. He didn't have to see him to know that. He'd tried to broach the subject gently, but George had exploded at him--embarrassment, but also anger. Anger that he couldn't be a man as his father was. "Anyway, we had a fight one night and he ran off," Methos said. After a few days, he'd checked with George's lover--the boy he wasn't supposed to know existed--but Robie, after he got over the shock of the visit, revealed that he was worried sick as well. "A week later the local constable came by and asked us if we were missing a son. He'd been knifed in an alley for the shillings in his pocket and the shoes on his feet."

Methos had sat outside the morgue, listening to Deborah scream. Realizing, among the smell of bleach and rot, that he had never seen his son's face, and now he never would. When Deborah quieted, he entered the room, touched George's chill hand, and carried Deborah home.

The rooms had never been so empty. He sat in one corner and Deborah sat in another. He slept during the day and she slept at night. It wasn't quiet--the tenement was never quiet, even in the dead of night--but it was barren.

Miss Macilreagh told him he'd gained ten years in a week. He told her it was more than that. When Deborah was sick, after she'd gone to hospital, he'd visited Robie once more and asked the boy to read him George's songs. The boy sung them for him--deceptively spry melodies with a bloodied, aching heart--and then wept in his lap.

"Losing a kid like that..." Joe said. "I don't know if there's anything worse."

Methos' eyes were on his cold coffee. "Deborah died of a broken heart. I just left. My eyes were healed--I just took off the blindfold, changed my clothes and became a different person." He shook his hands, watching the oily black liquid swirl around the paper cup. "But I kept his music. It's in with my journals. Always will be."

"But it still hurts."

"Not as much as it should." His hands moved faster and he watched the coffee careen around the rim of the cup. Faster and faster until it spilled over the rim and splashed his hand, the inevitable result of physics and the nature of liquids. "Can we talk about something else?" Methos asked.

Joe brushed the crumbs off his lap. "How are you and MacLeod?"

Methos scowled. "He's an idiot."

"Agreed," Joe said genially. "What about this time?"

"His girl asked him to marry her, and he's been having some sort of crisis over the phone at me all week. Conscience, monogamy, macho pride--I don't know."

"Ha!" Joe leaned back on the pillows, laughing. "He doesn't like having the ladies turn the tables, does he?"

"Not in certain areas," Methos said.

"But where does the conscience come in? He doesn't want to get hitched to a mortal?"

"He can't figure out if he's technically already married, actually. It's not the kind of thing a lawyer can work out and his parish priest is dead." Methos had been picturing Darius' response to the situation. Doubtless he would have fallen on the floor laughing--he'd always appreciated a ridiculous situation.

"I see," Joe said. "Hm."

"Since that identity is dead..." MacLeod--Gabriel Askey, rather--had been heroically blown to bits while protecting a young father and child from a jittery separatist in San Francisco.

"He can't just get a divorce."

"And he doesn't really want a divorce."

"So his honor is chewing him up like a piranha," Joe concluded.

"Bingo."

"That's a stumper, all right." Joe frowned.

"I told him just to marry the girl, but he's not listening to me. Really, I think he's looking for an excuse. He thinks he'll jinx her if he says yes."

"Tessa."

"Exactly. I tried to point out to him that I married him without anything dreadful happening, but like I said, he's not listening."

"You got married in Vegas. Not quite the same thing as a big church fling."

"Elvis pronounced us husband and husband, Joe. You have to respect the King." It was one of the stupider things he'd done in the past century--but still, a fond memory. He didn't quite regret it.

But he wasn't touching tequila for another hundred years at *least*. "I offered to move back to Australia," Methos said, "since they never have recognized same-sex marriage, but he told me I was missing the point."

"You're technically a widower, since Gabriel Askey is legally dead," Joe said, white eyebrows knotted with confusion. "But you're not exactly Peter Verity any more, so--man, we need a new word or six."

Pierson was a widower, too, but he knew what Joe meant. Methos rubbed his eyes. "Makes my head hurt. Call him up, tell him he's a ninny. Tell him I don't mind being part of a harem. Tell him life is too short to be so Catholic."

"Or I'll tell him to come home. I miss the guy."

"He is home." They'd renovated the Australia house together--but it was MacLeod's and no doubt. Methos elected to return to the States nine years ago, MacLeod elected to stay, and that was the end of that chapter. "He needs practice," Methos said.

"In what?"

"Being human. As opposed to being Immortal. Talk to him, Joe; he's not listening to me." Methos stood and stretched.

Joe shook his head. "I'll see what I can do."

"And ease up on Beatrice. She's a good kid."

"I know she's a good kid. But she's a good kid with shitty taste in men, and she's way too young to be getting married."

Methos clasped his arm in goodbye and left the room. Beatrice was sitting on the stairs feeding stale French bread to her rats; she looked up as he closed the door. "Sorry for going off on you," she said.

"It's all right. It's a big question."

"How old were you when you got married? I mean, you're not that old, and if it's been thirty years--" Her rats climbed her pant leg and sat begging on her knee. She stroked their heads absently.

He had to think for a moment--remember what decade it was, what his numbers said. "I was twenty-five. And you don't want to hear this, I know, but--"

"There's a big difference between twenty and twenty-five. I know." She didn't look very happy about it. "He's twenty-three."

Not even close, but it wasn't Methos' place to spill the beans."You're a smart girl," Methos said. "You'll figure it out."

Outside, he listened to the compass in his head--the one that pointed due MacLeod--and turned to face the Highlander. "Don't be an idiot," he said firmly.

Then he went home.


End file.
